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I'm back with some maps!

It has been far too long since I've been on here... But I've found myself on a mapping kick again and I didn't realize how much I missed it.

These are part of a prop journal I made for my D&D game. I've left a lot of features unlabeled since they are supposed to have been drawn by particular character for his own personal reference. Distances are also measured by travel time and assume appropriate transportation. In the first: walking; in the second: sailing ship, then camel, and then...

Those are either really good camels or slow ships.
My estiamtion is, that ships overland have about twice walking speed. Riding does not make you faster on a long run, except, that a beast of burden can carry your stuff and enough food that you can travel longer a day and don't need to make extra detours to shop for food at every village or even spend time hunting. ... But even with that, you only walk/ride about 8 to 10 hours a day, while a ship sails 24 hours a day, so one ship day equals about 5 land days. ... I admit, camels might probably be more efficient for long distance travel than horses, so this might be more like 4 times as fast only. Bu to get to the situation on the map where water speed is only twice the land speed, that has got to be some bad wind and/or good camels (not that it's impossible, just unlikely).

You know? I rechecked the distances just before uploading and I found they were about what I intended. It was exactly what I intended* for the camels (2.5 mph for 8 hours a day = 20 miles) and ~4/5 of what I intended for the ship. It should have been 48 miles but I figured 40 miles was close enough. However I based the speed of the ship off of this SRD:Movement - D&D Wiki So the rules told me that the ship should move at 2mph traveling 24 hours a day. Which does seem kind of slow. It also doesn't account for wind speed.

I know very little about ships so I did some digging online and found that between 2-7 mph is reasonable depending on how favorable the wind is. I think I'll erase every other dot setting the ship speed at 80 miles/day (3.33 mph). That's probably more reasonable. Thanks for the catch! Though I think you exaggerated the problem a bit. A ship day is only 3 land days.

*If you measure the distance across Anator in camel days on one map and compare it to the distance in walking days on the other you'll get the same length. (walking day = 24 miles)

I basically followed this tutorial. For the edges I made short jittery strokes in little arcs. And on the bottom edges of the forests there are series of short vertical strokes. I treated the parts where rivers cut the forest as any other edge, but made the interior lines a bit darker.

photoshop specifics: I used a hard round brush size 3 or 4 with size varying with pen pressure.

Just keep playing around with it til it looks right. It took a few tries for me to get it how I wanted. If you look around you can seen that there's a bit of variation in how they were drawn. The forests under Greyhill have smoother edges and the shadows are a bit too uniform. The large forest north of Rivermeet has edges that are still too linear and they're drawn with smaller arcs than the ones on most of the other forests. Thinks started to come together in the region by Falinde and Talnisur.